Part one:

There is only one
being, and all the functions of this being produce, apparently, a
plurality of beings. But these beings are fundamentally one being,
who is the host ... and the plurality are the guests within the
house.

The Holy G-host is
the same infinite spirit, internal to which its own modalities, its
own different modes of behaving and functioning, produced an apparent
plurality. Now the same thing appears in this Buddhist Wheel called
the Wheel of Life, and the analysis of it can be done in a variety of
ways. The usual way is to describe it as a wheel illustrating six
totally different realms within the totality of manifest universal
formal function.

But there is another
key to it.

Gods

You’re
all probably thoroughly familiar with the Greeks’ definition of
the gods and their behaviour ... that in Greek philosophy the gods
were so pre-occupied in their heaven with their own delights, that
they ignored the rest of reality. Now, it’s precisely the same
definition in this Buddhist Wheel is given of the gods, the Devas of
the Buddhist and Hindu system.

In the top segment
of the circle here we have the gods. Now it is customary in
literature to speak of these beings under the name gods,
divine beings and so on, and to allow a reader to believe that there
are beings that are gods, and are divine, that are utterly different
from human beings. But if you remember in the Sankya philosophy which
we did, it was stated very clearly that there are no gods in the
universe other than human beings who have attained power and
knowledge. So that when gods are referred to in the Buddhist
system, or in the Hindu system, what is meant by the term is, those
human beings who have attained the level of knowledge and power such
that they can get what they want.

Now if we define the
gods in this way, we can say where the gods live is heaven, which
really means the equilibration of power. And yet they’re inside
this wheel.

Now in occidental
religions, Christianity specifically, there’s a general belief
that heaven is forever — without bothering to define forever
— or heaven is eternal — without defining eternal.
But in the Buddhist system, and in the Hindu system, they say quite
simply that this is not so. They say that the gods are beings who
have attained, by their efforts, knowledge and power. And they have
attained this by their efforts in time. And whatever is gained in
time can only apply to time, and for a time. And therefore the beings
who are called gods, those attained human beings, although they have
got into this state of power and knowledge by their own efforts, if
they forget this basic principle — that what is gained in time
and from time cannot go beyond time — then they must know that
no matter how many Tories there have been in order to gain
this knowledge and power, there is a natural term in time for their
heaven, which they have, out of their meritorious deeds, constructed.

Therefore in this
Buddhist system it is said that the gods have a peculiar fault; that
is, they are so busy enjoying the merits of their deeds of knowledge
and power, that they are ignoring the finity of the heaven they have
created. They are ignoring the fact that it is a temporally derived
and temporally enduring structure, which must eventually come to an
end.

So the gods have
this peculiar quality — like we find in the Greek mythology —
of ignoring the rest of the universal manifestation. They don’t
want to know that there are other beings. There are beings called
titans, humans, animals, hungry spirits, beings in hell — they
don’t want to know about it. And because they don’t want
to know about it, they are called beings unenlightened. They
have pushed away the time of reckoning, the time when their good
deeds and merits will have been paid for in time and therefore must
cease.

Now if we remember
that Aesop and many other fablists — when they wanted to
criticise the human race and the human government — to keep
their heads on their shoulders, they used to disguise their
criticisms in fables, stories about animals: the story about a fox
that lost its tail and then recommended that foxes looked more
handsome without tails, and suggested that all foxes should have them
cut off. This is really a statement — a very cunning man having
lost a certain power, persuaded a lot of other people, or tried to,
to likewise sacrifice their power, to even things up. You
remember Christ said about Herod, that fox1.
Aesop is saying the same thing. Certain men of great cunning attain
positions of power, and in the process they find that they have lost
something, euphemistically called the tail. And they then try to
dissuade everybody else from tail-wearing.

By this method of
disguising criticisms in fables, the critics, the prophets and
others, managed to live a little longer than they would have done.
And so in the same way, the great religions have a method of
disguising a typology; a system in which human beings are
characterised according to certain stresses in six ways, and these
ways are given different names, and the statement is made that they
are really different beings. And then the person who hears this is
allowed to misunderstand it, by thinking that beings are in some
mysterious way separate from other beings — as that gods are
separate from humans; gods are separate from titans; humans are
separate from animals; animals are separate from beings in hell; and
those beings are separate from hungry, craving spirits that wander
about.

Now by splitting it
in this way, the great religious leaders were enabled to do double
talk. They could have a perfectly coherent typology which enabled
them to deal with other human beings at certain levels, certain
functional levels, without betraying their governing concept. And in
this six-segmented wheel, this typology is contained.

So when we talk
about heaven and the realm of the gods — and we say, the gods
are enjoying themselves in their heaven, and they are ignoring the
rest of universal manifestation; enjoying the fruits of their own
efforts of gaining knowledge and power — we are really talking
about certain human beings who, by their own knowledge and efforts,
have gained power and authority and positions of rulership.

Heavens and Gods in History

And if you want to
look for an illustration of these people historically, we can, today,
in a socialist Britain, say that we can talk about overthrown
aristocracies. We can say that it was thoroughly understood by the
people who devised this terminology, that the rulers of the world
were quite pleased to refer to themselves as gods. We know this
happened in Europe. We know that emperors allowed themselves to wear
a golden crown with rays coming out, to show that they were sons of
the sun, and allowed themselves to be deified; allowed the people to
believe that they were really gods. If you read Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar, you will find some degree of surprise in certain
people that a god can bleed, and a god can have some kind of attack
that unmans him, and a god can die with a sufficient number of knives
in him. But if we remember that the people themselves were unaware of
the true meaning of the terminology, and that the persons who devised
the terminology had another meaning for their terms, then we can
understand how easy it was to dupe people, and to rule them, by
saying things with two meanings — one meaning to the people who
devised the terms, and another meaning for the people who merely
passively received these terms.

So the gods then,
here in this system, signify only human beings who have attained
knowledge and power. And they’ve had it so long that they
cannot, and do not, want to imagine that that time will come when all
this merit that they have accrued, all this knowledge and power, will
be useless.

We did find, during
the time we abandoned India, certain factions in this country that
were rather godlike who thought we ought to retain India ... we ought
to keep hold of the British Empire. There were some more
forward-looking people, who knew that we couldn’t hang on
forever, and therefore said, give it away quickly before it’s
taken away, and we will retain our prestige. There was a great
fight about this in this country at the time. Those of you over
twenty-one will probably remember it. [This
talk was probably given sometime in the nineteen-sixties.]

During the French
revolution we saw that the French gods — you remember that one
of the French kings was quite pleased to call himself the sun-king,
and to try to re-animate this concept that kings are gods —
these aristocratic rulers were actually overthrown. Like the gods in
this Buddhist wheel of life, they did not believe that they could be
overthrown. They didn’t understand that certain of their own
members, a little lower down the hierarchy of gods, had sensed that
they were going to be invaded by other forces.

In the same
illustration we have Russia, when the revolution in Russia startled
many of the aristocracy, the gods; and their term of enjoyment of
their knowledge and power came to an end. So we can say the
characteristic here of the gods is that they ignore the rest of the
universe, and they have duped themselves into believing that their
heaven state of enjoyment will never cease.

Hells

Now
Buddhist psychology is essentially dialectical and therefore
immediately opposite to the heavens there are the hells, a variety of
hells, but they’re all under the general heading hells.
And the characteristic of these people in the hells is that, like the
gods, they dupe themselves, but in this case instead of duping
themselves into believing that joys and pleasures from merit are
eternal, the beings in the hells actually dupe themselves into
believing that sins committed in time merit eternal punishment
[12:51].

So the beings in the
hell that are quite illogical, they believe you can do a sin in five
minutes and pay for it for eternity. It is not logical. I doubt if
anybody thinking very carefully would say that a thing committed in
five minutes should be paid for in five years — in the case of
long terms, like five hundred thousand million zeroes after a figure,
could possibly be the correct amount of time to spend paying for a
sin of five minutes; is wrong. There must be an equation. If it takes
you five minutes to commit a sin, you should be able to recover in
five minutes, in all logic. But the beings in the hells have duped
themselves into thinking that they can’t do this.

Now we find in
Christianity that Christ, after duly being crucified, goes down into
hell, and he goes down with the express intention of saying to the
beings down there, you don’t need to stay down here.

And the peculiar
thing is, in the Buddhist system there is a very refined spirit and
he goes in the hells and he has two titles, one of which is the LordofDeath, and other
one of which signifies that he is the saviour. All he does is
hold up a mirror to the beings in hell, with a funny word written on
the mirror, which you might write HRIH, which you might pronounce
hree [the pronunciation can be found
on the The Buddhist Wheel.MP3
part 1 at point 14:30]
which means you did it yourself.

Your power
differentiated you, this created your concept of individual
responsibility, your power must release you.

But until they are
shown this mirror, that there is no criticism that is valid other
than self-criticism, the beings in the hells cannot come out. They
are duped into thinking, quite illogically, that they can pay an
eternal price for a temporal error.

So we observe the
cunning of this Buddhist definition, the polarity in it. There are
two kinds of way of imagining that something is going to last
eternally. One is to imagine your joys gained in time from your
merits of good deeds are going to be eternal; the other is to imagine
that your sins done in time are worthy of eternal punishment.

This
kind of opposition is not brought out in the literature on the
subject because it is very, very convenient for controlling people to
give them this sense that it is possible to commit a five-minute sin,
and spend five hundred thousand million years paying for it ...
because it tends to cause less performance of sin. And it weakens the
person who believes in it, so that he can do as he is told more
easily than he would otherwise do.

Titans

Now next to the gods
on this side there are some beings which are called titans. We don’t
need to give them their names in various other languages, because
they all add up to the same thing. Just as the gods are characterised
by ignoring the temporality of their joys, so the titans are
characterised by envy of the gods. The titans are all the big men —
I won’t mention any names of public figures, they’ll all
spring automatically to your mind — all the men who strive to
get power, and position, and authority, and knowledge, and
reputation, because they know that there are some beings that have
these things.

Imagine a man, it
might be a gentleman actually in Monte Carlo, gambling away the Chief
Rents from certain territories in England. You see them in the
Tattler, in the Sphere [periodical
magazines], and they say lord so-and-so at the tables, and
if you inquire the source of his income, it is actually Chief Rents
and suchlike things, from territories that were once green and are
now full of chimneys and things.

Now, imagine the
gods are there, and some ambitious fellows who are not yet gods, but
they are very strong, and their main characteristic is envy of those
gods. They want power. They want joy forever, they want large Chief
Rents, they want lots of land that people have to pay for in
perpetuity. And they don’t want to work even, they just want to
collect. So the titans are all those men who are essentially
power-pursuing because they know, they see that there are beings in
the world with power and with know-how, who have actually,
historically, their ancestors, gained these positions of power ...
positions for which those men don’t need to work any more. They
can have a town house and a country house, and another town house
because they don’t like the colour of the first one, and
several country houses in different countries, and they don’t
have to work any more, because their ancestors worked with double
bladed swords, battle-axes, clubs and such-like implements of refined
thinking [audience laughter].

Now today it is very
difficult to go out with a club, and proceed to club the gods into
insensibility, without upsetting the people. Because, funnily enough,
the people revere gods, because secretly there is inside everybody a
desire to be such a god, and so they’re rather nervous that if
ever they did become gods...

As
a fellow once said to me during the war, American soldier, who said
to me that, he claimed that the USA was superior to Britain because
he could in principle be the president, and I could not in principle
be the king. Well, we all know that there’s no more likelihood
of that particular G.I. becoming a president. He’d have to be
born in another family to get the necessary springboard for the jump.
But he didn’t want to know this. He really liked to think that
he could become the president, and if we remember that this wheel is
simply the six part whole being of the universe, and of an individual
man, then we know there is an impulse in each individual that could
appreciate being a god in this sense. We also know that because he is
not a god in this sense, unless of course he is, then he could have
his titan impulse, his envy of power, his envy of knowledge of
brilliance. So the titans are continuously striving for power ...
they have this peculiar quality that they can make efforts.

Animals

When we compare them
with some other aspects of the wheel, we’ll see what a
marvellous virtue this envy and power-seeking is. Because opposite to
the titans we have animals, and if we remember that again …
those look like animerds — the way I’ve written it[said as an aside] …
animals. The opposition between the gods and the beings in hell, was
simply that they were both self-duped into believing that their
condition was eternal. Now in the case of the titans, they pursue
power by their individual efforts ... and the animals do not.

So the animals mean
those beings, those impulses inside us which only react to pleasure
and pain. They take present pleasures, and avoid present pains ... if
they can manage it. So again there’s this peculiar opposition.
There’s a driving force in the titans, and in the animals, but
it differs in this sense: in the titans it is a drive towards power,
and in the animals, a drive towards a satisfaction of pleasures and
the avoidance of pains.

And yet there’s
a remarkable similarity because the behaviour of a jolly good titan
is very, very much like an animal’s, except that the titan
doesn’t need a present pleasant stimulus. And he doesn’t
need a present painful stimulus to make him move away, because the
titan has a certain amount of reflexive power that allows him to
anticipate the avoidance of a pain that has not yet arrived. That is,
he might crush a person that has not yet harmed him, but might, if he
manages to grow any bigger in five years time. And he might refuse a
present pleasure, if it interfered with his gaining of power, and his
possibility of joining the gods.

Whereas the animals,
those beings who respond only to pleasures and pains, have no such
capacity that the titans have, of forgoing immediate pleasure, or
facing immediate pain. So there again is this polarisation of the
titans and the animals.

In
every human being there is a titan, an envious impulse that would
seize power, and is prepared to forgo a present pleasure, and even to
endure a present pain, if it will lead to the power that puts him
with the gods. So we might find one of our most prominent
politicians, trying to stay sober during a TV interview [chuckles
in the audience at this reference], in order to give an
impression of rationality, and consideration for the electorate.
Actually he is not the very best quality type in that one, because he
doesn’t manage it.

Men

Now, the humans, I’m
going to write men in here, it’s really wrong to call them
humans, I’m going to write men in there and [referring
to the drawing], they have a peculiar quality too. Men have
the quality called egoic pride. Now this is something that
titans don’t suffer from at all. A titan has no pride; he only
has the drive towards power so that he can be like the gods. So he
has not got an opinion of himself that would make him refuse
something on self-opinion. He couldn’t say to himself, I am the
kind of person that cannot be bribed — a type that can
be bribed. And he couldn’t say, my pride will not let me bribe
that inferior being, because he can and does bribe that inferior
being to get a step nearer the gods and their heaven.

The peculiar thing
about man in his egoic pride, this peculiar pride, consists in one
thing – self image; of value; that somehow, mysteriously,
simply to be a man is already sufficient merit. In America of course,
in the last few years, they’ve done a terrific analysis of what
they call the image, and everybody has to have an image, and
the image must be continuously polished up and redefined and kept up
to date. And it does not matter what or who the person is, as long as
the image is alright. Now this is an extreme manifestation of the
essential quality of the man level: egoic pride.

This pride in him is
very funny, very strange. Because his pride will not let him take a
present behaviour like an animal, it can even make him suffer a pain,
in public, with a stiff upper lip — for no other purpose than
demonstrating stiff-upper-lippedness [more
audience laughter]. It can let you walk off the cricket
field, bowled for a duck, head held high[spoken
with parody]; it can dissolve an empire with a gracious
smile, quite easily.

The essential
quality of man is that he can do the most strange, unprofitable
things, and miss the most profitable things, and still keep his image
— that somehow he’s a thoroughly decent type. He’s
not an animal. He doesn’t have sensuous lust. He’s not
deterred by threats of pain, and he’s not a titan with envious,
greedy, power-seeking being, and he’s not a forgetful god who
doesn’t know the rest of the word exists, he is a man of pride
in being human. Actually he’s not human at all, he’s just
proud [more laughter].

Hungry Spirits

Now, obviously to
the men, there are some funny beings, I’ll write in here their
technical name in Sanskrit, they are pretas —
I’ve written that in there because it’s a short word, if
I wrote the English equivalent it would be two words, and it would be
longer, and I haven’t that much space. These beings are
characterised by wanting something they haven’t got the power
to get; and which if they got they couldn’t digest
it. They are humorously called hungry spirits. [27:00]
And they are said to be the spirits that the necromancers call up,
and we’ll see a simple logic about this:

Just as men can do
without things out of their egoic pride: you know, if a man hadn’t
had his dinner and he goes to a friend’s house and dinner is
just starting, he can say, thank you very much, I have eaten,
and sit there. And they’ll say, won’t you have
something?[And he’ll say]
“no, no, no,Mother told me always to leave half my
dinner on the plate so people don’t know I’m hungry”.

[Chuckles in the
audience for several of the following sentences.]

Now these preta
beings, these hungry spirits — they have no pride whatever,
they go about with their mouths slightly open, they look, if they
come in your house and it’s the meal table is being cleared up
they go… … and look at a bit of cheese on the table.
They move towards it. They have no pride, and if you say, would
you like a bit of cheese, they say, thank you very much.
And the chair is up to the table, bibs on, and then they get
indigestion.

Peculiar thing about
them is; they are represented in Buddhist pictures in a very funny
way. They are very long, thin beings, rather like a banjo, with a
very round tummy that’s swollen out; the rest of them is long
and thin. Now, there is such a thing inside human beings too, they
have these cravings for things they can’t digest. I know a
young fellow who has at the present moment a craving to be able to
follow the score in public at a concert, given by Barbarolli. It’s
a funny thing to watch [Eugene chuckles]
but he actually wants it.

Now there are many
other things these preta beings want. You can define them all
by examining yourself very carefully. If you go home and ask
yourself, what do I really want that I can’t digest and
can’t conceive myself of digesting? Then you can say all
those grouped together, and considered to be in a realm of their own,
are preta beings. Now they’re said to be the things that the
necromancers work with, and they’re the fellows that manipulate
the dead — the spirits of the dead.

That means to say
that a very astute man can recognise the hunger in people for things
they can’t digest, and then make a little model in PVC of it,
and sell it to them. There is actually on the market in America, a
very small PVC travelling companion, small enough to be carried in
the breast pocket, and self-inflating to human size, so that you
won’t feel lonely on a long journey [more
laughter]. These are being specially manufactured for
pretas consumption.

Now, when we see
these six realms — remember a realm means a zone that is ruled
by something — and that any individual human being has got
these six types of tendency inside himself — they are not just
simply six separated realms of the universe —

as if the
heavenward gods were someplace far away;

and another
place where titans were, battling merrily for power;

and another
place where men are being proud and doing what ‘appens they
want;

another place
where animals are indulging themselves in ways that men are too
ashamed to do;

another place
where hungry spirits go about looking like banjos;

and
another place where people sit there, biting their finger nails
forever on account of a five-minute sin.

There are no such
separated realms in the universe.

We know in
scientific terms today that matter is a modality of power, that power
is a field, a uni-field, a continuum, and that this field, being a
continuum is throughout itself identical in essence. It can modalise
itself in these six ways, anywhere whatever — and anywhere that
a wave is produced in an ocean modifies all the ocean. And therefore,
in the same way, any behaviour of a god affects men. We know it has
done, in fact because the gods have got themselves written about by
men. So in spite of their ignoring men, men have not ignored them. We
know that men have actually written about titans fighting gods, like
Prometheus. We know that men have written about hell, we know that
men have actually studied certain kinds of unsatisfied cravings. And
we know that men have studied the animals.

A peculiar thing
about men is that they evaluate things. And they make this their
mark;. that we are evaluating beings, we are very proud of our power
of evaluation; and therefore in man we have a record of this.

We also know that
the animals are impinged upon by men and interfered with, so that
animals are not ignorant of the existence of men.

We know the beings
in hell are worrying like mad about the other beings that are not in
hell, and which are never with them.

We know that the
hungry spirits are actually hungering for something that they haven’t
got, therefore they know there is something other than themselves.

And we know that
titans in pursuing power and moving away from the powerless also know
there is something other than themselves.

So we can say that
these six presuppose each other. There is a peculiar logic about the
circle:

Thinking things done
in time can last forever — is the gods.

Thinking things done
in time can last forever is a belief of hellish beings.

The only difference,
one thinks the good is lasting,

the other thinks the
bad is lasting.

The titans have a
pursuit of power

and an immediacy of
response towards it,

the animals have an
immediate response

but only towards a
pleasant stimulus

and away from an
unpleasant one.

The men have pride,
and hungry beings have no pride.

And all these are
functions of any being whatever in the universe. And they’re
all classed as unenlightened beings — from which we can see
that there must be, logically, an enlightened being who drew the
circle in the first place. Some being had made an analysis of these
six beings, and it must have been a being who had these six beings as
six realms of himself. Because ultimately all knowledge is
self-knowledge.

Dependent
Origination

When this analysis
was looked at very carefully, just as we say in inductive reasoning
we write out particulars, and then we move in from the periphery
towards the centre, we want to find out what it is common to all
these beings who are unenlightened, that generated them as they are.
And we find in the centre of this wheel, three figures: One is a
cock, another is a snake, and another is a hog. [34:38]

Now they are shown
biting each other’s tails, so we have a trinity here,
generating a wheel of six spokes, six zones. The cock signifies
desire, the snake signifies aversion, and the hog signifies the egoic
consciousness. So we can say that all these six type of function, or
six types of being, are generated out of three basic impulses:
desire, aversion, egoism.

Now
if we like to think about this logically, these three presuppose each
other. This is the theory called dependent origination. You
cannot, without desire, constitute yourself as an egoic being. You
cannot, without aversion, reject that which is beyond egoic being.
You cannot be an egoic being, without desiring those things that
subserve your end, and feeling aversion towards the things that would
destroy you.

So these three
central principles, desire, aversion, egoism, presuppose each other.

Now in European
theories of causality, the general usage of the term presupposes that
you set one thing up at the beginning and call it the cause,
and then put the other things down and say they are effects.
But in this expression dependent origination there is not
causality in the European sense. There is a statement that they
presuppose each other to be, so that they are coexistent , that
egoism and desire and aversion co-exist, and the appearance of one is
the appearance of three. You cannot have desire without egoic
aversion, to that which would impede your desire. You cannot have
aversion without egoic desire, for that that your aversion is
protecting you from. You cannot have egoism without finiting
yourself, fastening on something, and when you’ve fastened onto
something you’ve drawn a circle, the things inside the circle
you desire, the things outside the circle are threatening your egoic
being.

So when we think
about dependent origination we are not to think about it in the
European causality sense, as if a cock caused a hog, and a hog caused
a snake. These three are really three modal functions of a fourth
power — which either manifests in this three-fold manner, or
doesn’t manifest at all.

So the wheel of the
gods, the titans, the men, animals, hungry fellows, and beings in
hell, is dependently originated on desire-aversion-egoism. Therefore
the cure of desire, aversion and egoism, is the same thing as escape
from the wheel.

Now the escaping
from this wheel is the whole meaning of all the religions of the
world. This wheel, in its dependent origination, has all its zones
presupposing each other. To get out of it, we have to conquer egoism,
desire and aversion simultaneously. If you conquer one of those, you
conquer the other two. If you conquer egoism, that is the idea that
you are a finite being, then automatically and logically, in defining
yourself as no longer finite, there is nothing outside you that you
could desire, or that could give rise to aversion. Because in denying
your finity, you logically assert your infinity, and everything is
now included in the consciousness that liberates itself from the
definition of egoism. Likewise if there is something that you
dislike, and you conquer your dislike, you have conquered your egoic,
finite response. And if there is something you desire to possess, and
you conquer this desire to possess it, you have also conquered your
egoic response, and you are no longer feeling the aversion for that
which will stop you getting that which you want. So in a nice,
logical way, this wheel in any one of its parts presupposes all the
other parts.

Twelve Symbols Around the Wheel

Now it is spread
out, and twelve other little symbols are placed around the wheel. And
a little series of symbols are used to explain it.

We could give it
that a blind woman gave birth to a potter — and the potter
modelling clay a monkey — and it was so life-like that it had a
dream in which two men were in a house boat. The monkey jumped in the
house boat, and went in the house part, and it had six windows. And
he looked out of the six windows. And while he was looking out, he
saw a beautiful maiden and he wanted this, and he called her.
Probably she was a monkey-maiden, and she came, and he felt pleasure.
And she gave him a bowl of some lovely delightful mixture …
she’s a lady, I think. And he suddenly developed a terrible
thirst for this, and from this thirst he wanted to posses the lady
who had given him the bowl. And this keening caused a relation with
the lady, and this relation caused a birth. And this birth logically
presupposed a death. Because once he had finited himself in this way,
there was no way back other than by dying; that is, by rubbing out
the whole fantasy.

Now if we ask what
this blind woman is, we can say that the substantial aspect —
remember we use H for gentlemen and M for ladies — when we say
a blind woman, we mean that the substantial aspect of universal power
vibrating produces form so that this not-knowingness — remember
to know means to lock up, and sharpen, to formulate,
this not knowingness — with its vibrating in this universal
power, produced from itself, a potter, a formulator.

And this formulator
produced from itself, consciousness of specific form. This
consciousness of specific form is a monkey.

This monkey had the
dream. This consciousness of specific form then saw two men in a
boat.

And these two men
symbolised psyche-soma, nama-rupa; the being that has two sides; the
physical side and the psychological side.

The house with the
six windows is your body, your vehicle with five senses and the
common sense that links them making six.

Looking out of these
five senses, messages come, and some of these messages are very
pleasant. This causes us to go out, and we have a taste, then we want
more.

And we cling to it,
we relate to it, and out of this relation we get born, and because we
are born we must die.

Now this whole cycle
presupposes, in any one of its parts, all the rest.

Now if you remember
when we said, let the paper represent the infinite power, sentient
power, and we’ll draw the ripples going along in all
directions, and we fill it up any way we like. Imagine this is the
blind lady; it is the totality of all possible functions and forms.
And if we superstress any bit of it which exists, we immediately make
a specific form. And this specific form then causes the lapsing from
consciousness of the infinity of other forms which we might have made
if we’d have done this [draws
something further on the white paper], we can make other
form. Every time we focus our consciousness on a specific form we
have stopped that same consciousness from focusing on an infinity of
other possibilities.

And therefore we can
see, egoism means no more than to focus consciousness down through a
particular form, and then insist that this form is central to our
being, and we are going to define the world from, and through this
form. And that there shall be no other interpreter of reality other
than the view through this window.

Priest King Scientist

Now if we remember
that the terminology was invented by some very intelligent fellow a
long time ago, and these fellows embodied priest-king-scientist in
one man. Each man was his own priest, his own king, his own
scientist. He had to know something scientifically, empirically, he
had to formulate rules, how to control the situation out of this, and
then he had to go through a ritual performance.

As a ritual
performer and blesser and sanctifier he was a priest.

As an enforcer
of his rules he was a king.

And as an
empiricist deriving information through experience he was a
scientist.

So if we go back and
look at ancient Egyptian civilisation — Indian, Persian,
Chinese — wherever we go we will always find that the rulers
embodied these three functions. Now your head is your king, your
heart is your priest, your belly is your scientist.

The belly is your
scientist because, of course the obvious way to test anything
empirically is to them. This is seen quite easily in a baby. As soon
as a baby can grasp something, it doesn’t matter what it is,
mentionable or unmentionable, in the mouth it goes. Try it! —
this is the scientist in the baby. You can tell by the baby’s
expression that it has these two functions: desire, aversion. It has
no pride at that level really, so it doesn’t mind looking
horrid, because the thing that it has put in its mouth is horrid. And
it will beam with delight, unashamedly and without pride, when it
attains the power to stand upright for half a second.

So here we see in
every human being the totality of these six realms exist. In every
human being the generative forces of these six realms and six
tendencies are egoism, desire and aversion. So that we cannot
liberate ourselves from these silly, six-fold definings, without
going to the root cause. People that don’t know that gods are
simply attained human beings cannot get rid of gods in themselves —
because they don’t know that gods are egoic beings of desire
and aversion.

If anybody knew
that the gods are subject to desires and aversions, and that the gods
foolishly and erroneously ignore total reality, because they are
enjoying the fruits of their previous activities which have conferred
knowledge and power upon them, they would cease to revere those gods.

They might look
at the titans as envious of those powers and decide they would try
the titan role for a bit. But if they examine the dependence of the
titans upon egoism, desire and aversion they will disown those.

If they look at
men with their pride, they will say these creatures are doing nothing
except measure, evaluate, egoism-desire-aversion.

If they examine
the animals they will observe that they non-reflectively react in
desire and aversion.

That the
pretas, those powerless craving beings likewise are driven by egoism,
desire and aversion.

And people in
hell have been put there by their own erroneous definitions —
by egoism desire and aversion.

So then you go back
to say, how can I conquer egoism, desire and aversion within
myself, the first thing is to see that the infinite ocean of
possibilities is non-egoic, and as soon as you let go of your pet
definition of yourself, you automatically become released. To do this
you have to examine your desire-aversion, because your desire and
aversion is the pattern of your egoism. If you like one thing and
reject another thing, you are automatically wrong. So you have to
examine the grounds of your desire-aversion to release yourself from
your egoism.

Now the whole of the
message that Christ gave in the statement if you die you can live,
if you give up your life for my sake you will gain it —
meaning for the sake of the Cosmic Logos. Or Buddha’s
statement, that you can only gain freedom from this wheel by
conquering that which led you into it.

Buddha’s Enlightenment

Now remember Buddha
flogged himself for several years, starved himself for several years,
did all sorts of funny things; ascetity; and came out no wiser. And
then, he was sitting depressed under a lovely tree called Bo, and a
woman came up and seeing him looking miserable assumed he was a
saint. So she quickly ran away to the village and got a bowl of milk.
She brought the milk and put it before him. And he immediately became
enlightened — because he knew that she had made a mistake, that
she thought he was a saint, that she thought he could bless her, and
therefore she went and got the milk. So she had given him the milk in
order to get a blessing. And then he immediately saw that he also
must have given something in order to get a blessing.

So he then analysed
what it was he had given to get where he was, and the answer was very
simple; he had given interest, nothing else. He had taken his being
inwards to a particular from the infinite. He had identified himself.
He had become fascinated by a particular image, and said; this is
what I would like to be out of the infinity of possibilities. And
in committing himself to this, he had committed himself to the whole
cycle of birth, disease, old age and death — and if he didn’t
become enlightened, rebirth, and repeat. So he promptly decided to
give it up.

The word Trishna
which is translated thirst, gives you the key to this, because its
etymology implies a threefold function. And this threefold function
is the one we’ve just examined; that egoism presupposes the
desire for that which will support the ego, and aversion for that
which will destroy it, and that either desire or aversion prove the
existence of egoism.

If you see this
threefoldness you can actually start not grabbing-at-things for which
there is an automatic desire, and not pushing-things-away that you
automatically dislike, but by re-evaluating the total stimulus
situation to rise above the finite attitude towards it. To the people
that can’t eat bananas, to people that can’t eat
tomatoes, because they have a definition of these things, this
definition stops them. There are beings that can actually swallow
things that are poisonous to other beings. How they got able to
swallow those things that are poisonous to other beings in the first
place, was by not defining them as undesirable. And therefore we can
assimilate total reality, providing we do not desire a part of it,
and have aversion to the other part.

So
the peculiar thing about this, as in the nirvana of the Buddhists, is
that we are aiming not at a negative state — possibly Matthew
Arnold [Sir
Edwin Arnold (1832-1904)]
helped to give that negative interpretation to the Buddhist view in
his Light of Asia — we are not aiming at a negative state in
which you don’t want anything to do with reality, but a
positive state in which you can have something to do with everything
of reality, by not suffering from desire and aversion, or any of its
separate elements. We will now retire for refreshment.

Part two of the talk: The Buddhist Wheel.

You will notice that
this particular thing is a wheel, divided, and at the centre is
contained the material we were dealing with last time. If you look at
the illustrations in the different sections, you will find that they
correspond with the gods, the hellish beings, titans etc., and if you
periodically look at this diagram, it will help you to see how
terribly difficult symbolism can be. But you will observe that it is
a wheel, and that gripping this wheel there is a rather horrible
demonic-looking figure, who is clutching and chewing at this wheel.
Now this is to symbolise that the appetite of the German type Ungrund
is busy chewing this wheel of existence. In other words, the whole of
existence is actually being eaten by some primary appetite
represented by the demonic figure. All time consumes its own
products. Time eats his children. It is represented here with this
demonic figure.

I’m going to
say more or less what these particular symbols mean. And we’ve
done the central bit. And we’ve done the six-fold bit, and we
were going to talk about the twelve-fold division which is the outer
part of that same diagram. And there’s a very peculiar
dialectical relation between them.

You saw that in the
case of the six sectors that we did, that the gods were opposed to
the beings in hell. They had one thing in common: they were actually
repeating something. The gods were repeating their enjoyment, and the
hellish beings were repeating their punishment.

In the case of the
titans they were opposed by the animals, and again they are driven:
the animals are driven by pleasure pain, towards sense objects. The
titans are driven by the will to power, but in the same world. They
want to acquire the power, the material possessions, the signs of
power which they think the gods have, and therefore they use all
their energy to acquire those things which, to the animals, are a
matter of instinct; the titan, going to these, with the consciousness
of an egoic individual.

Then human beings
were opposed by the hungry spirits, the impotent hungry spirits. And
the human beings had a hunger like these pretas or hungry spirits,
but the human beings were characterised by pride, whereby they
conceal their hunger. The only difference between the human beings,
or mankind, and these impotent hungry spirits, is that the type of
being mankind can manage to obscure, to hide their hunger
under manifestations of pride in their humanity.

Twelve
Symbols in the Outer Circle

Now we’re
going to go on to the twelve, and see a peculiar symbolism, which is
very subtle.

Blind Woman

At the top here,
number one, there is a blind woman. And when a symbol is used
concretely in this manner, it can have many levels of interpretation.
Now in all the religious scriptures based on the source literature
from which the Judaic literature comes, woman refers to the
non-intellective side of being. And man to the intellective.

Man, the male, is an
intellectual being with a power of initiative based on his
intellection. The woman is a volitional being with an emotive bias,
and a materialistic orientation. The man is orientated into the world
of mathematics, and geometry, and logic. The woman is orientated into
the material world, the mater-ial world, the world of mother. And
therefore in the religious work, in the major religions of the world,
where it refers to a woman it is referring to a non-intellective
something.

And therefore the
blind woman here signifies a non-intellectual conative drive. It is
an infinite power, it is the substantial aspect of reality, which in
its spiritual aspect is perfect self-illumination. So the blindness
of this woman is really the blindness of a basic universal drive that
is refusing intellectual formulation, because it is determined not to
be cornered by any kind of logic. It is pursuing a certain end,
driving towards it, and it is not doing so by logic. Therefore it is
represented here as a blind woman.

The word there in
the original, Avidya, we can translate, not as ignorance as
the scholars do, because ignorance means wilful disregard of
some object. We are translating it as nescience, as simply not
knowing in any specific sense. Those of you who are married –
I mean the men who are married — will understand what it means
to have this kind of emotive disregard for the logic that husbands
produce. There was a drawing on one occasion in Punch of a woman
saying to her husband, I am not going to be diverted by mere fact.
Now this is exactly what is signified by this blind woman. But this
blind woman is power.

Remember all power
basically is sentient, that is, it feels itself, it feels its
own movement. It is a potential of self-realisation, but at this
first stage it has not bound itself, it has not committed itself to
any particular form, because it feels any particular form to be a
limitation on its potential infinite enjoyment. It is seeking, not a
finite pleasure, but an infinite one, and therefore it continuously
keeps on the move. And it is blind because moving without turning
round is a continuous conative drive with no object to see. It is
blind because it is objectless. And it is objectless because it is
committed to infinite movement.

The opposite of this
is a scientist, dedicated to the consideration of a specific type of
existence. Like a man I know who has studied the stress/strain, for
forty five years, of the left foreleg of the common housefly. And he
has photographed minutely this particular thing, because he has a
theory about it. And he has shown some remarkable things about
left-footedness in the housefly.

Now this is really
quite important, because the two presuppose each other.

The Potter

The non-objective
continuous seeking of this blind woman, the seeking without finding,
is exactly the opposite of the dedication to one specific form by the
male empirical scientist. But in the movement of this blind power,
there is an inevitable overlapping, an intersection, the spinning
produced by this intersection [8:31] carries us in the second place
where we find a potter; a man busy making pots.

Now
the word samskara here is a word, it’s exactly the same word as
samsara — which means the whole of power movement — plus
the letter K. When we introduce this letter K into this word, it
means close it up. Therefore the symbol of the potter here
means a power that is making containers. Now if it weren’t
for these containers there would be no pluralisation of appetite, the
drive of the blind woman would be infinite, and eternally
unsatisfied, because being infinite it cannot in its movement come to
a term, and therefore it cannot finish something.

But when in the
overlapping of the movements of this blind woman — in its
intersection of the forces which it represents — there arises
spinning. Then each one of these zones of spin, a vortex, creates a
little sphere which is just like one of the amphoras dug up in the
byzantine boat last night, for those who were watching, and therefore
the second one shows formation and pluralisation of forms, so that a
multitude of vehicles of the blind woman are produced.

So now we have to
imagine that the blind woman, through her own blindness, has through
her own non-seeing movement met herself — being forced by her
non-observation, her non-science, to observe things that she is not
looking for, namely finite forms. When infinite forces move, because
they are infinite they are not finited to any specific direction. The
result is that they produce within themselves zones of intersection,
zones of spin, vortices, ensphering processes. Each one of these is a
pot, container, a vehicle for the same blind woman. As we go round we
will see how we add each one that we have dealt with to the next one,
to explain it.

Now this wheel is a
wheel of dependent origination. It is not a Western causal concept of
the temporal order, in which one thing earlier in time has caused
another thing later in time — like the shunting of railway
carriages, where one of them is bumped by the engine, and bumps the
next one and so on down the line. This is such that you can start at
any section of the wheel, and if you try to define it you will have
to define all of it. [11:31]
Any part of it is presupposed in all of it, and all of it is
presupposed in any part of it.

You know that in the
case of chemical elements which were pursued for a long time by the
scientists as ultimate simples, the combination of which would
produce the universe — but when they found these chemical
elements in the atomic scale, these elements have a peculiar bias, a
valency tendency. A tendency to join with other elements, and this
presupposes that these apparent simples are being bound together by
invisible forces. Now the invisible forces of the whole, are, by
their movement producing ultimately, these so-called material
particles, simply as centres of reference. You cannot understand
carbon unless you understand all the valences of carbon. You must see
how carbon, added to other things, produces various compounds, and
ultimately organic forms. And therefore when you are considering any
one of these, it is necessary to remember all that you have already
thought of all the others, and to continuously to define any one in
terms of the eleven others, or the other eleven.

The potter therefore
is nothing but the motion of the blind woman, which, through its
non-observation of where it is going, through its infinite motion,
must cross itself, and in its crossing produce vortices, spheres,
containing processes. And this is the potter. Pot-ter itself
implies that this power has become embodied in the terra, in the
earth, by this rotating process.

Now if we imagine,
once these vortices of spheres have been produced by the dynamic
rotation of energy of this blind primary conative drive, then we have
to deliberately postulate space, which is power, not the dark cold
empty Copernican space, real space which is full of power, spinning
throughout itself, so that just as the wind, if you watch its
evidence on the waves of the sea, will show you that it blows in
little puffs. It doesn’t blow on a straight line front, it
blows in little spherical puffs. In other words it is making spheres,
it is rolling as it’s going along. And each little roll
ensphering, produced by this blind conation within the infinite, is
considered from its formative aspect, the potter. So that when we
are talking about the potter, the principle of the production of
finite containers, spheres of influence, or finite beings, we are
simply talking about the blind woman producing unavoidably these
ensphering processes — these vortices.

The
Monkey

Now we want to
consider how the potter becomes the monkey. The blind woman who gave
birth to the potter, the potter who modelled the monkey.

If we imagine space,
which is sentient power, to be spinning, making spheres everywhere,
and each one of these spheres is, by its rotation, relatively
separated from all the other spheres, then this apparently separated
sphere is a monkey. A monkey is the key to man. It is the evaluator,
the consciousness, the sentience, insofar as it is locked up inside
one of these spheres.

Now the term
vikyama[?] here, for the monkey, which the scholars translate
consciousness, without defining the word adequately, really means
that sentience, within one of these spheres, because it is ensphered,
is being stimulated from all round itself in the six directions,
north, south, east, west, up and down. And in the process it is being
presented with stimuli from other spheres. And it is therefore
continuously looking about for the source of the stimulus.

Now the only way we
know, as finite beings, that there are other beings, is because we do
not initiate every change that occurs in our body. If you think very
carefully about this, and you think to yourself there is a noise
coming from somewhere in this room. Now I feel that I am
responsible at this moment for this particular noise. Now the only
evidence you have that this noise is coming from me, is that you are
not initiating it. And therefore because you are not initiating this
noise, you postulate another being [17:08]
as cause. So that this stimulus which arises in your consciousness,
and which you have not initiated, is your sole evidence that there is
an external world. And therefore it is the cause of you believing
that there is an observer and an observed, and that the two are not
identical. This makes it that the monkey see two men in a boat
[17:36].

Two Men in a Boat

Now the two men in
the boat — nam-rupa, this term — nama means name, rupa
means form. Nama is the actual movement within your substance which
happens in this dual situation, and the movement within your
substance when you listen to it, you call that a naming process.
It is an actual moving of your substance that you listen to, when you
are thinking. And that form which arises in consciousness from the
movement of your substance, which is the naming process, is always
correspondent with the name. So if I say the word pyramid, and the
word sphere, then you get two different images, coming in your mind.
An empiricist might say this is a product of your education. But if
we go back historically it won’t matter, because the educator
is the stimulus situation.

The
first men who shouted pyramid when they saw a shape sticking out like
that, did so as a spontaneous reaction to a stimulus caused by a form
like that. What they saw, and the emotive response to what they saw,
were always correspondent. Some words were obvious: the onomatopoeic
words, splash, bang, wallop, and so on, these words tell you that a
given thing, perceived or experienced, has a correspondent emotional
response, which coming out of the vocal organs expresses itself as a
word. The result is that the collection of names inside you, and the
collection of forms you believe to be outside you because you didn’t
initiate them, allow you to divide the world into psyche-soma. Into
soul and body. Psyche; soul: Soma; the body. And therefore because
you feel your own sentience inside your skin, because you are
identified with processes inside your skin, and you talk to yourself
inside your skin, and the words you use inside your skin seem to you
to be your own products. When you say boat, when you say man, when
you say monkey, something arises in your consciousness from these
names and you believe that these names are inside you. They are
mental process and they don’t appear to be causatively
connected with the boat, with the monkeys, with the men, outside your
skin. And yet there is a correspondence. And this fact leads you to
believe that you have a physical body, separate from your own psyche.
As you do not initiate certain of the changes that occur in your
consciousness, you attribute these changes to beings beyond your
consciousness. And you have a central consciousness of your own to
which you can turn, and inside which, if you practice, you can
isolate yourself and concentrate with two radios on and a dear friend
explaining a very interesting thing to you, in which you have no
interest. You can actually gather yourself together, you can smile
and you can say yes, yes, no, no, in the right places.

It’s
marvellous stuff, the substance of the psyche — you can conduct
several conversation simultaneously with the interest in the right
places, and not hear anything at all because you’ve been very
busy watching out of the corner of your eye that fascinating BBC2
crossword puzzle. Now this means that your two lives, your apparent
body life and your apparent psychic life, are simply the product of
the potter or vortical spinning, within this primary universal
conative drive.

So: two men in a
boat. The boat is your being, which in its gross manifestation is
your physical body, and the two men are the two conceptual
consciousnesses that you have. One of your consciousnesses you call
the sensational one, the sentient one, and this is the one that makes
you think there are things outside yourself. And the other one is the
one that you think internally is your real self as opposed to other
selves.

You think you are a
soul, you think you have a body, and you think there are other bodies
outside you, and which by inference have souls. And all this is
caused by the samskaric activity of vortical spin, or the potter. So
the dualism of the inner and outer self arises from these two men in
the boat.

Now the two men in a
boat — of course as they’re in the boat all the time it
has to be a house boat — so they have built this house within
the body boat, and they have drilled holes so they can watch the
external world. And these holes are the five senses, and a special
one called common sense meaning the sense that is common to
the five. So in the house with the six windows, what is referred to
are the five sense organs, plus that unifying something which is
called common sense.

Now this house with
the six windows is brought into being by this potter process, having
isolated zones of space — remember space is sentient power —
and within each zone the mental process, the monkey, has been under
stimulation, and through this stimulation has given rise to belief
that there is differentiation between — the psyche, the
observer — and the soma, the observed. And because it believes
there are external beings, it has drilled holes in its own being to
peep out of, and see what is going on. So the sense organs are
actually movements from within to meet the external stimulus.

If you examine the
eye you will find that the eye has been built by light. The sun has
created the eye. Sound has created the ear. Perfumes have created the
nose, and so on. Each sense organ has been created by the necessity
of dealing with certain orders of stimuli coming in. And therefore
this Sadaya, this word means being-intersection continuously. This
word which is referred to as the creation of the six sense organs,
really means beings interfering with each other continuously. And
those things which you do not initiate alarm you, and you grow your
sense organs in order to peep, and see what is there. [25:01]

So the sense organs
have a peculiar duality, because stimuli have a duality. Some of them
are assimilable, and therefore pleasurable, and some are not
assimilable and therefore painful, and therefore your sense organs
are on the alert to discriminate between pleasant and unpleasant
stimuli. The same nostrils that can flare with delight, can also
screw up when they get the wrong kind of perfume. The same eyes that
can open with delight at a beautiful picture, can narrow critically
if they don’t like what they see. So there’s a dualism in
the sense organs themselves.

The
Pair of Lovers

Now in the sixth
position here, there are a pair of lovers. Funny thing about this
symbolism, it is made difficult on purpose. If we were to run round
this circle with the full meaning of what these things mean, it would
be so logical in its development, the mind would say, yes, yes, yes,
all the way round, would recognise it and dismiss it, because it
would understand it, perfectly. And therefore the symbols are made
quite difficult, so that we can actually work hard to get hold of it.

If we say, let the
sound one be used to symbolise anything circumscribed with a
circle — call it unity. And then the same sound uttered again,
another one, and the sound two shall be considered equivalent to one
plus one. And if I say twice one are two, the head nods, and says,
simple, so what? …and dismisses it.

Everything that the
being comprehends too quickly, it throws away. Only that comprehended
with difficulty is retained. And therefore the symbolism is made
difficult. Women understand this more than men. They understand that
if they are too easy to get, they will be dismissed. We won’t
go into the psychological causes for that, but if a girl falls in
love with a boy and says to him first time, I am in love with you
I will go anywhere in the world with you, you care to say I am yours
forever, you may put your jackboot in my upturned human face and it
won’t turn me away, then this boy will interpret: well I’ll
have a look around elsewhere first, because that one is fixed.
[27:31] Now this is a tendency in
sentient power. That which it knows, it dismisses. Let’s
remember that.

So here, a pair of
lovers is used to represent sparza, which means contact. Now
when contact occurs between A and B, then there is stimulation of A
by B, and B by A. So the pair of lovers here really means
stimulation.

Let’s go back
a moment and look at the logic of this. We have an infinite blind
urge. It is blind because there is nothing to see. If you look at the
word blind and look at the word lin in it, and the word linen and
suchlike words including Lincolnshire, and Lancashire by sound-shift,
the thing means weaving. Imagine infinite power as a weaving,
continuously, and that these peculiar weavings are themselves power
threads, and all the threads are self-moving. They are not moved by
something other than themselves, like material threads are moved by a
blind weaving woman. These very threads are sentient power, and they
are searching, they are moving themselves. [28:51]

So we have this
infinite self-weaving power, and in its weaving is at every
intersection point creating spin. This spinning is the potter the
finite container the ensphering. This potter encloses sentient power
thus produces a finite mind, the monkey, which finite mind, because
it is finite is stimulated from all round it by an infinity of
stimuli, and thus its consciousness is split by the stimuli into
bits. So the monkey is hopping about all the time under the influence
of the stimuli.

A person who is
unintegrated is at the mercy of the stimuli that come. When Carl Jung
talks about individuation, in its fullest sense as the highest aim of
universal consciousness, then he is referring to this fact: that
until you integrate all the elements of your being you are at
the mercy of the stimuli that come to you . There’s this quite
logical weaving of sentient power — self-interfering makes the
potter — each little pot or sphere produced is a little monkey
— each little monkey, because stimulated from outside gives
rise to the concept two men in a boat, psyche-soma my inner processes
and that which is beyond the limit of this between the skin surface
of my body. This makes me draw holes in my body.

Those of you who
have enough time to just go through the morphology of a developing
human being from the egg, will be completely fascinated by the way
the sense organs are actually grown from within this being, outwards
to meet their stimuli. The sense organs are produced, and there is
contact between the external world and the sense organ. And this is
represented as lovers, and the lovers are quite simple, really.
Because the lovers are simply the inside and outside of this sphere
which, the potter has created. That is, your psyche is a lover. What
he loves is total reality outside himself. So that he has a tendency
to extend his understanding, his power, his grasp of reality beyond
himself. He is loving the world.

Simultaneously the
world is loving him, because he is a centre of integration
possibility. All the energy going out from an individual human being
into the world, his pleasures and pains, his likings and dislikings,
his graspings and failings, the rejection which he undergoes —
all these things are simply the relation between two lovers: yourself
within your skin, and the universal beyond your skin. Your interest
in the world is exactly equivalent to the world’s interest in
you. All the world loves a lover. You are a centre of potential
integration and the world is a potential of individual experience.
The two presuppose each other.

We see here there’s
no question of priority of universe over individual, or individual
over universe. These two come into being simultaneously. The skin
comes into being as a result of the play of forces from any centre,
to the space around it. And therefore six, the lovers — the
number six, means here, sex, and therefore the lovers. We’ll
see over there later another function of sexual union, but here it
means the contact of your sense organs with the external world, and
the contact of the external world with you as an individual point of
reaction.

The biggest error of
empirical science is to believe that an empirical scientist is
attacking the universe to discover its secret, and that the universe
is not attacking him to make him discover its secret. Those who
realise that the universe is actually attacking man, to make man
individuate, to make man integrate so that man can understand the
universe — because only through man can the universe understand
itself. There must be a centre of individuation, of integration, in
order that the universal energy can focus and concentrate itself, and
from that point of individual, integrated consciousness, look back at
the universe, and realise itself.

This is why in
Christian theology man is created a little lower than the angels —
the angels are archetypal forms – but is destined to be higher,
because the angels are separated from each other logically according
to categories, and one angel cannot become an angel of another
category.

So there are angels
of the intellectual hierarchy, angels or archetypes of the affective
emotive hierarchy, angels of the conative power-drive hierarchy, and
these angels cannot get out of their category. But a human being can
get hold of all the angels from the three hierarchies, and by work,
individuate and integrate in himself, so that he is then better than
the angels. This caused quite a lot of jealousy in heaven at one
time, and the reverberation produced our best philosophical
arguments.

Arrow
in the Man’s Eye

Now
once we’ve got the contact, we go down here to seven. There is
an arrow in a man’s eye, who bhedana here, means a
continuous process of affective response. That is to say, that when a
stimulus comes to you, you can either assimilate it at an appropriate
rate and like it, or you cannot and to that degree you dislike it.
But if you like this thing, you have a preference. And this
preference is that something will be present with you, or if it’s
unassimilable, that it shall be absent from you. So the arrow in the
man’s eye means the mood that arises logically from the contact
of yourself with your external universe.

Drinker Served by a Woman

Now
this moon, this affect, this liking-disliking, passes into the next
phase represented by a drinker served by a woman. Remember these
symbols are not just fabricated to make the thing look nice and
romantically interesting. They have meaning. Woman refers to the
conative and affective side of nature, and man to the intellective.
And in this eighth position there is Trishna which is thirst, and it
is a desire that that pleasant affect, that pleasant emotion, shall
be re-experienced. And it is served by woman. That means that once
the affection is roused in you, your own non-intellective side, that
is your female side, will want to repeat this pleasant stimulus. So
that you — the male, the drinker, the differentiator, the
selector — are being fed by your own conative, emotive,
non-intellective side.

Grasping At Fruit

Now this
automatically produces the grasping at the fruit. That is to say, if
a thing is pleasant enough for you, not only do you want to
re-experience it, but you want to guarantee that you re-experience
it, and therefore, you wish to possess it. Again it follows quite
logically from the [37:40]
contact of the senses and affective response, I like-dislike, I move
toward the likes, I would like to have them again, and to guarantee I
have them again, I would like to own them. This brings us to the
picture showing sexual union of a man and a woman.

Sexual Union of a Man and Woman

Now
bhaava, becoming, here: a union of the man and the
object that he decides to appropriate. This man wants to own the
source object that will allow him to repeat his pleasant experience.
And in so doing, he comes into union with that object. If we were to
interpret that this pair of lovers and this sexual union over here
simply refers to the sexual activity of a man and a woman in the
world, it’s most external interpretation, I wouldn’t mean
very much to us. It would simply be an illustration of something
that’s going on, but it wouldn’t tell us what to do about
it.

But here it says to
us quite simply that this bhaava, this becoming, this
being-development arises because the desire for repetition of the
pleasant stimulus has produced a possessive appropriation of the
object, and the man then becomes unified with his object. This is a
man in any field of activity at all, who, seeking a position that
will give him the power to repeat this pleasant feeling, actually
becomes one with his activity. The man who is identified with any
kind of institution, structure, organisation, church, state, whatever
it is that he gives himself to, so that he can no longer separate
himself from that being; this is represented by the sexual union.

Woman Giving Birth

Now, from the union
of this man with his object, which he now owns, there emerges another
one: the woman giving birth. ???Dyatu????????, throwing out to try to
objectify, to establish a dynasty, to say that because I have got
this object and this object is so terribly valuable, I must make
children to take my place at my desk, from which I give out the
orders that guarantee that I will retain my hold on this desirable
object. And the development of his organisation, this
organisation developed beyond its original is his child. From the
business point of view it is subsidiary organisations which spread
throughout the world as children of a parent organisation. And the
man who is so identified, is living and extending his energy in this
way.

From
the point of view of material existence, at the physiological level,
the sexual union produces a physiological child. And this child is
the objective projection through time and space of the intent of the
parents to perpetuate their affective enjoyment of that object to
which they first attached themselves. We see this most obviously in
the great ruling houses of the world — from Babylonia, India,
Egypt, Greece, Rome, to our own day, that families who have by
effort, by will, by intelligence, by cunning, by whatever means, have
established an objective hold on a power situation, like to transfer
this to their children, the military monarchies and so on, because
they are identified with the issue of their own being. And therefore
they give birth. The big organisation gives birth to a smaller
organisation. The great empire has colonies, the great business has
subsidiaries, and the man/woman in their relation bring forth a
physical child.

Man
With a Corpse

Now once a finiting
process has brought itself to its term — and there is a natural
term, an end beyond which any given form cannot be developed —
when this end is reached, then the necessity of death arises, because
one cannot be released from a thing into which one has put one’s
energy, other than by talking that energy out. And if the energy put
into it is too great, the being has not sufficient energy to pull
himself out of it. And therefore his energy is committed to it, as
long as that form will function and pay back in this sought affect,
this sought feeling, this sought emotion. And therefore the necessity
for the destruction of the object. Without the destruction of the
object, that identified psyche cannot be released.

Imagine a man who
was a king by his own effort in a little valley in the middle-east.
Supposing nobody had invaded this valley and he never went outside,
because he didn’t want to know. He’s had all his
pleasures inside this valley. And he was surrounded if you like, like
the Shangri-La story, he was surrounded with a protective ring of
mountains, and nobody knew he was there. Cut off from the external
stimulus of the world, enjoying himself in his established pattern,
he would be fixed. And within that centre, could not change his
behaviour, once he had reached the logical term of its development
[44:10]. He will be pinned. Now
when any civilisation has reached this end, then luckily,
historically, there have always been some other beings outside that
enclosed situation, outside the Euphrates-Tigris valley situation,
who have rushed in and knocked over all the buildings, captured all
the ladies, moved them to another country, and killed for his own
sake, the unfortunate monarch who had become identified. And
therefore death is a necessity of release for an identified being.

Now there is no
death, other than identification. The infinite sentient power is
infinite life, and death means division, it means separation, it is
the potter, the creation of the vortex, which lays the foundation of
the necessity of death. The identification creates the necessity of
the breaking of the identification. And therefore this word death
here, maraNa, means no more death; that the substance, which
is the blind woman, shall continuously differentiate. It is doing
this all the time, and producing, by its potting activity, continuous
zones of possible identification — and these zones of
identification, continuously produced, are local deaths. A cancer in
the body, generally, is a number of cells that for a certain reason
to do with subdivision, have gone to the term of subdivision beyond
which they cannot go, and then started to fuse together again, and in
so doing they have grown outside the control of certain parts of the
organism, so that they are now autonomous beings within the being.
They eat your food, steal your nourishment, and grow without
integration of function with the rest of your body. So in the same
way, this death only means that locally there is identification, and
a refusal to integrate function with the environment. There is no
other death.

Now, when we’ve
gone round here logically we see that it is really a very simple
thing. If we go round it very quickly we can dismiss it.

This locked mind
inside the bodies has a dual aspect, the inner psyche the outer soma.

This necessitates
the drilling of portals in order to see the external world.

This results in the
contact of the external world and the sense organs.

This results in the
arising of feelings, I like it/dislike it.

This results in
preference thirst for certain experiences.

This results in
grasping, possessive appropriation, in order to repeat these things.

This results in the
binding of the man and the object.

This results in
giving birth along the line of development of that object to its
term.

And this reaching
the term is the necessity of death.

If we say it very
quickly like that, we can say, that’s how it is —
quite easy. We’ve understood that and then we can go on,
forget about it … hence the difficulty. Difficulty
introduced on purpose, to make you realise what it means.

The Twelve as Pairs of Opposites

Now it is arranged
in this way, round in this manner, not accidentally, in pairs of
opposites. Just as there’s a real opposition between the gods
and the beings in hell — both ignoring something; the gods were
ignoring the finite nature of their heaven, and the beings in the
hells are ignoring the possibility of escape from hell — so
when we look at these twelve, they are also related.

Blind Woman and Arrow in Man’s Eye

There is a blind
woman and there is an arrow in a man’s eye. The blind woman by
her movements has produced a situation in which it is possible to hit
a man in the eye. That is to be made to see dialectically, that
blindness begets the vision. The wounding of the man, the arising of
the feeling in him, I must see more clearly to get what I want,
is the dialectical product of the blindness of the original primary
conation.

Potter and Drink Served by Woman

Now the potter here,
formation, has produced a woman holding one of these pots —
that is his will — in order to drink out of it. There’s a
real relation between the opposite concepts. Unless we make pots we
cannot hold our lemonade in them. If we can’t do that, we can’t
drink. So the formative process here, is a precondition of the
possibility of drinking; that is, of taking it from one zone and
putting into another zone. Each zone can then specialise in a certain
kind of self-being and in specialising is depriving itself of
something else that it might have had.

To specialise is to
deprive yourself of an infinity of other possibilities, and thus to
create an appetite for what you are not. And this potter, therefore,
begets the situation where you can have a thirst. There’s a
real meaning in the opposition.

Monkey and Grasping at Fruit

Now the monkey, the
closing of the mind, the finiting of the mind, makes possible the
appropriation of things to add to this mind. Again it’s not
accidental that this mind, reacting to stimuli from all around
itself, is watching pleasure-pain, pleasure-pain, and reaching out,
and grasping those things that give the pleasure, and appropriating
to itself all those pleasurable, and therefore pushing away those
things that are not logically consistent with the things you want. A
monkey begets in this way.

Two Men in a Boat and Sexual Union

The two men in a
boat, the psyche soma, reject the possibility of this union.

Now we see here a
very subtle thing, that a very valuable inversion of polarity is
possible. The man and his own being can be considered as man/woman,
in which your physical body, your material self can be
viewed as female because it is full of non-intellectualised
tendencies. The body is full of urges — not yet
intellectualised. Your intellect is masculine to your body. Therefore
the two men in the boat, psyche/soma, by means of names and forms,
can produce a new kind of unity — the unity of a man, a psyche,
with his own being, his soma.

Now this is the one
that’s most important in all religious teachings — that a
man shall come to terms with his opposite pole.

Now in certain
psychologists — Jungian psychology is fairly obvious —
there is a fairly clear statement that a man has to come to terms
with his opposite pole. That the male must come to terms with his
femaleness, and the femaleness with the maleness. But there is not
enough clarification that your femaleness is your physical body, and
your maleness is your pure logic.

Your physical body
is full of wants urges, desires, aversions, it likes and dislikes,
some things it thinks are comfortable, and some are not, and it tends
to move towards the comfortable, and away from those that are not. In
other words, your physical body acts just like a woman. It wants what
it wants when it wants it. And your pure logic inside, has the job of
bringing this woman into subjection to its authority. The man that
cannot control his own physical needs for comfort and pleasure,
cannot control the woman in him.

The opposition
spirit and body is exactly the same as the opposition woman
man. When St. Paul said Christ is the head of man and man the
head of woman, Christ was the personification of logos, cosmic
reason2.
The man who can see a purely mathematical-geometrical-logical
proposition is really male. The man who can make his body obey that
logic, is a hermaphrodite. This is the kind of hermaphrodite that
Christ is talking about, when you can make your physical body obey
the logic that you know is applicable in that situation. That is the
real hermaphroditic saint.

House With Six Windows and Woman Giving Birth

Now, again, the
house with the six windows — gives birth. Because when we look
outside through our sense organs, we actually give birth,
psychologically, to our own interest. We don’t ordinarily
notice this fact: that we are already equipped with tendencies from
our ancestors, to go into the world and interpret it, to give birth
to interest, to put that interest upon an object, and to see that
object as desirable, and not know that we have made it desirable. We
have given birth to an interest.

Birth means thrust
it out of that house, out of that being.

When you look upon a
thing and select it and say, that’s worth attention, that’s
worth more attention, that’s worth slightly less attention, and
so on — looking at beings and things, antiques or whatever
you’ve got — when you are doing this and believing that
you are seeing value in things, if you forget that the value you see
is only the value you have yourself fabricated, self here
equals your ancestral protoplasmic experiences, and thrown
into the outer world, until you realise this, you are at the mercy of
your own formulations. You are giving birth to evaluations.

And every evaluation
that you make in this way ties you. You project your values.
You decide what is good, bad or indifferent in the world; you
energise your body to go and get it; you project your interest
and fasten yourself in the process of this projection, upon some
specific being in the time-matter world. [55:41] And thereby you
precipitate, here, the man with the corpse.

Pair of Lovers and Man With a Corpse

Every pair of lovers
in the finite world, putting their arms round each other, each is
putting his-her arms round a corpse. When you get married, if you
don’t die simultaneously, one of you will have to bury the
other, unless you leave it to the corporation [laughter].
Now we see here that there’s a very interesting kind of
dialectical process.

There is also a
relation in that a certain area is allotted to the gods, to the
titans, pretas, hell beings, animals and men. Now if you look at your
diagram and meditate upon those facts, you will find that there’s
a very intimate relationship between the beings that we discuss in
the six sectors each one of which covers two zones of the twelve. And
there is a very good meditation.

Do not think that
it’s accidental, that these things are placed in this way. They
are placed there by a consciousness which sees the whole thing. It is
not a thing worked out empirically from the sense world. It is a
thing that is projected from whole consciousness. The symbolism of a
wheel like this, the symbolism of the Christian trinity, of the
??????? of the Hindus, or any of the great religious concepts, is not
something arrived at by a man empirically building from the ground.
It is something that the whole consciousness sees and precipitates,
and then the empirical ego, your little individual self, can meditate
upon that precipitated form, in order to develop itself back to the
consciousness of its source. [57:49]

Question
from a listener: Tell me how all these characters were connected. In
the circle you were saying how they form a complete circle even, if
there’s the same connection between the corpse and the blind
woman, ……

The reason I didn’t
do that course is because we would have had to go round again. The
connection actually as we’ve said before: this is a wheel, not
of a serial causation not where one thing in front of another in
time, causes a following one, but the whole wheel itself is power,
sentient power. This wheel is a real existential wheel within each
individual, and within the universe as a whole. So the connection
between this man with the corpse, between man and his own body,
between life and death, is that, after going round, and by this
process of identification with a finite object, necessitating the
destruction of the object, as in the case of a physical body, when
you get this body, you got it after hard work and choosing, when you
develop it, you choose the mode of its development, and when you
reach the term of its activity, so that you consider yourself
sufficiently frustrated by it to realise that it cannot fulfil your
intent in the way you hoped it would, then you vacate it.

Actual physical
death is not caused by disease, it is caused by people vacating
bodies with a sufficient number of impediments in them to make it not
worthwhile to remain in them. Some people give up the body, with no
physical symptoms. X-rays find nothing, and these people die. Some
people persist for years with the most terrible diseases, because
…did somebody laugh then?

Yes
I did. I suddenly thought ….[unclearrecordingofthisresponse…]

They have a motive
actually for persisting, but the actual immediate cause of death is
quite simple: it is vacating the vehicle because the psyche inside it
has now conceived it to have reached its term. Identification is
death. And the death of the body with which one is identified, is the
precondition of the release of consciousness from the specific form
to which it has committed itself. So when we come to the man with the
corpse — remember the corpse is simply your body — the
man, man means evaluator, a man is a psyche; the psyche is carrying
the body with it. You are carrying death about with you, as long as
you have a physical body. And when you get fed up with the
limitations imposed upon you by this body, then you give it up, and
this is death.

Now the
consciousness, in going round the wheel, going through its
experiential cycle, has informed itself — that is, put form by
deliberate evaluation, within itself, of the external situation. It
photographs events and objects of the outer world, inside itself, and
it does this so fast that it doesn’t have time to pattern them
properly. It is always running from moment to moment. There are not
many people in the world, not everybody in this room will do what I
am saying not many people do, because it is very special group of
people, of course.

All the people in
this room, when they go to bed at night, they deliberately
look at the moment of getting into bed, and then they play the whole
of their day’s experience backwards, to when they first woke
up. And they will not allow themselves to go to sleep until they’ve
done this, as an essential ritual in self-comprehension. Outside this
room of course, people don’t do that [laughter].
They just feel tired and go to sleep [more
laughter].

The result is that
ordinary mortals have no real integration, and consequently when
death occurs, when a sufficient number of impedances have accumulated
in their physical body so that it is no longer worthwhile remaining
in it, then they vacate it. But they take with them, in their own
subtle body, that is the body of the ideas which have arisen in them
as a result of their contact with the external world, the totality of
the images of their experience constitutes a subtle body, a body of
fine energies, ideas — ideas are energies — and all this
mass of unintegrated material they have inside themselves, after they
have let go of the physical body.

So now they depart.
Symbolically they go to the moon. They sing a certain popular song on
the way, and when they get there, they then proceed, in a kind of
dream contemplation, and try to sort out and categorise their
experiences. This period of sorting out the experiences is
necessitated, because ordinary people haven’t time to
categorise to their daily experiences every night, and consequently
they give up their bodies before they have assimilated their total
experience.

There’s an
often ….and somebody

[….break
in recording]

…..means that
you go into a state in which your mental content your mind and all
its furniture constitute your body of reference. And because it is
all higgledy-piggledy, you are in a kind of dream state, in which you
watch the parade of your unassimilated unintegrated experiences
passing through consciousness. And as you watch it, you begin to
detect the patterning of your choices. You see how one choice led to
another, how each choice presupposes, radially, a lot of others.
Again, dependent origination. And then when you have assimilated and
categorised the full significance of the totality of your choices
during that one life in the physical body, then there arises as a
result of the finity of your experience, a specific resultant.

This is very
important.

When you’ve
been on that wheel once, it is extremely unlikely that, in that one
occasion, you will have sufficient interest and energy to disperse
over your total experience, to see its total significance. And
therefore in one lifetime you will acquire a specific bias, a
resultant of the totality of your experience, which will leave you
with less than omniscience. And because you have less than
omniscience, after you have categorised and assimilated the
experience of that one life, you are biased from your own experience
— from your knowledge, your own assessment — to believe
that you need some more experience to balance the deficiencies which
you have detected. And as soon as this assessment is completed, you
then wait with the pattern integrated as far as you’ve been
able to integrate it, and the gaps in it where you have not been able
to integrate it, and the resonance of your pattern determines that
when a certain situation occurs on earth, then there is a possibility
of you completing your education. And then you re-enter at a certain
point, the logical development of which will be, the path of
experience that will fill in the gaps of your prior experience.
[1:06:31]

So the dead person —
again is a blind woman. That is to say, he’s not omniscient,
there are still elements in him of unassimilated experience, still
elements in him of undetermined directions, still needs, urges and so
on — all these now proceed to fashion again for him. He is now
the potter. He is now modelling himself a new being, modelling a new
monkey, a new mind, which he believes will deal adequately with his
experience, in the light of his prior experience. Now, he then
proceeds to go round the circle again, and ordinarily he chooses a
finite object, a finite process, through which he wishes to go,
because of the finity of his prior experience, the finity of his
energy, and therefore the lack of power to integrate fully the
meaning of his experience.

As long as he goes
round this wheel in a linear manner, he will continue to do so. This
is the eternal recurrence that frightened many, many philosophers in
the ancient world, and many in the modern world. Nietzsche was the
19th century exponent of this frightening concept, and
frightened himself with it.

Now Gautama’s
analysis of this was, that the first is the cause of you staying on
that wheel, and that only at the point of the first can you get
yourself out of it.

Let’s think
what happens. You don’t know something but you have an urge to
act. Because you don’t know, therefore you cannot act, other
than in a specific, formulated manner. You become a potter. Because
you have formulated yourself in a certain way, you are a certain type
of monkey, jumping in a certain way, your specific mental process is
determined by the way you have been patterned, from the amount of
material you absorbed last time.

This monkey, this
consciousness responding splits you again into psyche-soma. You
believe that you have a physical body. You are not identified with
absolute consciousness. You are identified with potted consciousness,
as a finite mind, believing that you have a valid dualism,
body/psyche. You look through your sense organs again, your six
windowed house. Again you come into contact with the world. Again you
fall in love with some specific, finite parts of it. Again from this
contact arises like-dislike, again the thirst, the desire to drink
again.

Now Gautama’s
analysis stops at this point. Notice this figure of 8 which is the
figure of eternity, infinity, and reciprocal relation. This two way
process: if I thirst I drink. If I drink I thirst. There is no curing
of fires by throwing coal in them. They do not become smaller by
putting coal on. Thirst does not become less. It may appear to do so,
because if you do something you like doing, if you eat a certain kind
of food you like; for a time, because of the finity of your stomach,
you are stopped from eating it. You call yourself ‘full up’,
sat-isfied, but when that has been assimilated, because of the
enjoyment of the prior occasion, this thing is now stronger. You want
more of this thing. So he said, let us cut it out at this point.
The next stage is lasting. If we allow this thirst, we will want to
own the thing that confers upon us the power of satisfaction.
Therefore kill the thirst and go back quickly.

Now this thirst,
this Trishna word, implies a threefold spirit, sentient power, with
serpent cunning in it, to get its own way. There is only one way of
dealing with it. You cannot deal with it by indulging it. This is
Gautama’s analysis. And remember, he is an objectification of
cosmic logos, just in the same way the Christian system, Christ is
Logos, logic. The logic is, that when the thirst is there, if you
say, I know you, if I indulge you I will increase my tendencies in
the same direction, and I am in danger of grasping at the object that
confers upon it. If I do I will fall into union with it and then I’ll
have to die again and then I will start the round. So if I don’t
get out of it on the thirst level [1:11:28]
kill the thirst, then I will not get out at all. Now this is the
analysis of Gautama. He was an embodiment of Cosmic Reason.

Christ gives another
analysis of it, and he’s also an embodiment of Cosmic Reason:
he says, you may go round forever in this way, but if every time you
go round you sharpen your awareness of it, so that you actually see
in this thirst what is determinant, in the very act of the thirst
quenching, you will be released from it. They’re really saying
exactly the same thing in two totally opposite ways:

One is saying give
it up, and the other is saying, don’t give it up; look at it.
But if you look at it, you will give it up. And if you give it up,
you will have to look at it. in the case of the Buddhistic analysis,
it is well-known in Buddhist theory that Gautama who rescued himself
because of the pain of going round this wheel eternally, when he had
extricated himself from it, then he found himself with compassion,
which he had not got rid of. He knew that all the people involved in
this wheel, were still suffering and would do so eternally, unless
they were shown the way out. So although he had got out, he had to
come back again — and therefore the ever-reincarnating Buddha.
He learned about this, came to the solution, give up thirsting,
get out, go to nirvana, and as soon as he arrived there, he was
now again absolute, sentient power, whereupon he re-entered this same
wheel, with the intent of showing people how to get out of it —
but he came into it positively instead of blindly. He now knew the
wholly wheel positively, and came in the exact opposite way.

Now meditating upon
this, the Buddhist philosophers for about six hundred years said,
this being so, that when the Buddha to rescue himself from this
suffering then had to come back into this same suffering cycle
because of his compassion, which is inherent in being, why bother to
try to get out? Why not realise that you will come back when you are
out of it, out of compassion, have your compassion here and now, and
eternally reject your salvation. This is the doctrine of the
bodhisattva. The bodhisattva is a being who says, I will not be
rescued, because when I am rescued my compassion will put me back, so
I won’t be rescued, what I will do is persuade everybody else
to be rescued, and I will stay here until they are all rescued, this
is an infinity of them, I’m going to be here. Now you can
see here the dialectics of it.

This wheel
presupposes the demon outside holding it. That is to say, the
infinite appetite has created the wheel, is holding that wheel in
being. The appetite trapped in the wheel that is being held wants to
get out, and devises a method of getting out, namely, give up wanting
to be in. And then it goes back and it is now the same appetite that
created the wheel, and because it is infinite the wheel is
continuously filled up with beings, and therefore it will re-enter,
to tell them the way out. Now this guarantees another circle, if you
like, another endless cycle at right angles to the first one.

Now this is very
similar to the analysis of Christ and the meaning of incarnation:
that providing you know that your death when you get it is willed,
because you are self-frustrated, you can then see the possibility of
absolute frustration before you start. Now the only thing that
frustrates you before you start is the identification with the
finite, your ego itself, which by its finite nature, its very
limitation, cannot fulfil its infinite appetite. If you try to escape
from it, you finish up back in the infinite. So why not live in such
a way that you are inside out, outside in, this circle? So that the
bodhisattva concept of the Buddhists, and the Christian concept of
the incarnated god-man — that is, a man who has realised his
divine origin — are really identical concepts.

So when we look at
this wheel, if we can look at all these twelve, learn them serially,
then see them in pairs of pre-supposing opposites, and then see the
whole of the inside of that wheel as a precipitate of the outside, to
make an object for the outside to contemplate, and then the outside
and the inside simultaneously — when you can do this, then you
have attained that third stage described by the sages. The sage says,
when you are a little baby you see a tree as a tree. When you are
grown up and become a philosopher, you know that a tree is only a
sense phenomenon, it is merely a response of your sense organ to
certain orders of stimuli, and you interpret these as tree.
But when you become a sage, you now see that the tree is the tree, as
the baby saw it. The analysis that the philosopher gave of this tree
was simply the intellectual splitting of the psyche-soma, the
namarupa, the name and the form are really the same.

The child sees a
certain impression. The physiology says this is stimulation of some
nerves at the back of the eye. That’s very clever. The
physiologist looking outside, a little older, can still see the tree
as a tree. When you see all the trials, all the tribulations, all the
impedances that come to you, as willed by you, not
imposed on you by other beings, as willed by you for your
self-realisation, then you affirm everything that happens to you, as
and when it happens [1:18:05].

Now in the Genesis
story, Adam and Eve are thrown out of the Garden of Eden. Eden means
absolute judgement, no judgement, don’t judge.

He’s told by
pure intelligence, do not divide the world into good and evil. Do not
eat that fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Don’t
say, this is good and this is bad. But he does this. Adam’s
will, that is his wife, his drive into externality, is stimulated by
nature the serpent; the result is that he divides the world from the
affect — like the arrow in the man’s eye, the arrow is
the serpent in Genesis — he divides the world into I like
it, I don’t like it, and thereby finites his pathway
through the will.

Now most people are
adept at blaming other people for the impedances they encounter. But
the reality is that in the period between death and rebirth, when
patterning the next life in the light of the previous life, that you
have chosen the necessary impedances for your enlightenment. You have
deliberately gone into all those situations where people are going to
contradict you, in order to be turned back on yourself, to discover
that you, and no other being, constitute your own destiny.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ End ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1Luke 13:32 And he said unto them, Go
ye, and tell that fox, Behold, I cast out devils, and I do cures to
day and to morrow, and the third day
I shall be perfected.

21Co 11:3 But I would have you know,
that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is
the man; and the head of Christ is
God.